IT'S A DIRTY JOB...

FARM MANAGER Evan Sofro walks past cornfields laid out in straight, neat rows bordered by 8-foot-tall sunflowers, their faces tilting downward from dinner-plate-sized heads. Above them, mid-July monsoon clouds balloon against a cornflower-blue sky.

But Sofro’s attention is on the land stretching beyond these orderly rows. At first glance, it looks neglected. Then Sofro points out the plants hidden among the grasses: tomatoes, basil, bush beans and carrots.

“This is an irrigated, no-till system,” he explains. “Rather than build beds and pull weeds and plant and pull more weeds, we just came through, ran a drip tape, threw up a trellis and planted. And the plants are establishing themselves in a much healthier state.”

It’s this and other experimental fields at the Native Seeds/SEARCH farm in Patagonia that, for Sofro, hold the promise of sustainable agriculture in the Southwest.

“The question is, what can we produce with the resources we have?” Sofro says. And by resources, he means rain.
 

The nonprofit Native Seeds/SEARCH was founded 30 years ago to preserve heirloom seeds of crops adapted to the arid conditions of the Southwest, along with the cultural knowledge of how to grow and use them. Ultimately, the goal of the organization is to get the seeds into the hands of people who want to plant them. The organization bought this farm, on the outskirts of Patagonia, in 1997 to regenerate its seed collection. But now that process is nearly complete, and the farm is moving beyond its primary function to experiment with holistic agricultural practices that use less water.

In its early years, Native Seeds/SEARCH consisted mostly of a network of farmers growing out traditional seeds, Sofro says. And that was ideal because the crops remained in the context of the culture and the agricultural systems that developed them.

But as the seed collection grew and the number of farmers who planted them shrank, the organization moved toward a conservation model, deep-freezing seeds for long-term storage.

“The reality is that seeds are living, breathing organisms, and you can’t just stick them in a bag in a freezer and expect them to live forever,” Sofro says. “Eventually, seeds die. And the way to ensure they don’t is to plant them. It’s pretty simple.”

So, in 1997, Native Seeds/SEARCH teamed up with The Nature Conservancy to buy the farm. Native Seeds/SEARCH bought the fertile 65-acre floodplain, and The Nature Conservancy took the wildlands surrounding it. With about 2,000 accessions, or genetically isolated lines of seeds, the process of regenerating the original collection has taken years.

“A lot of the crops we have out here are seeds that were collected 20 or 30 years ago,” Sofro says. “It’s been a long process. Sometimes, all we were given was 20 seeds. Or maybe we have a lot of seed, but because it hasn’t been grown out in 15 years, only a quarter of it is still viable. Or maybe it was never viable. So there are a lot of factors involved.”
 

And while the process has been largely successful, there have been a series of challenges.

“We’ll plant out fields and, like, three plants come up,” Sofro says. “It’s frustrating as a farmer to maintain a half-acre for four plants. But it’s what we have to do.”

Keeping the seed lines pure also means extra work. Self-pollinating plants are grown in mesh pollination “cages,” which let in light and air but keep out pollinators to prevent cross-pollination.

Other plants have to be pollinated by hand. With plants like corn, that involves a complicated process of bagging the tassels early in the morning on just the right day, then returning after the dew rises to transfer the pollen from one corn plant into the bag of another and staple it shut.

Now that only a handful of accessions have yet to be planted, for the first time, the farm is able to move beyond the basic maintenance of the collection. It’s a step Sofro sees as crucial to the organization’s mission.

“Seed conservation is not simply maintaining seeds,” he explains. “If you don’t have an agriculture to support them that’s regionally adapted, and if you don’t have people who are interested in consuming them [and] who know how to use them, the seeds lose their use.”

Sofro contacted McDorman after a trip to Peru. He wanted to share stories about seeds McDorman had given him. By that time, McDorman had sold his seed company and come to work for Native Seeds/SEARCH.

“I pretended that I knew what Native Seeds/SEARCH was,” Sofro recalls. “I said, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s really cool.’ And I got on the Internet and was really inspired by the work of Native Seeds/SEARCH. [McDorman] offered me an open-ended job. He said, ‘Whether it be for two weeks or two years, I’d like to have you down here.’ ”

Native Seeds/SEARCH initially hired Sofro to work as a pollinator for two weeks.

“I got down to Tucson, middle of July, hundred and whatever degrees, and I just said, ‘No way,’ ” Sofro recalls.
 

From the standpoint of the farm, the next step in that mission is to work on a sustainable agricultural model.

“We need to focus on what we can grow here,” Sofro says. “And what will thrive when we consider what ‘here’ is, which is an extremely arid region with monsoon summers.”

So far, these experiments have included planting a single crop variety at different times, planting into cover-cropped no-till fields, and planting in partially tilled fields that are irrigated less often or use only rainfall.

“So we’re in a transitional period of really beginning to explore what is possible with less water,” Sofro says. “How does that affect yield? How does it affect if we can actually produce anything?”

Sofro is tall and thin, with dark hair and a sparse mustache. He wears sandals, a ball cap and a T-shirt that reads, “Locally Grown, Fresh From the Farm.” Now 24, Sofro came to the farm in 2011, with little formal education and experience only with growing vegetables on a much smaller scale in Idaho.

Native Seeds/SEARCH executive director Bill McDorman remembers the first time he met Sofro, at a permaculture conference. At the time, McDorman owned a regional seed company.

“He’d just turned 17, I think,” McDorman recalls. “He was just a kid, and he asked 50 of the best questions I had ever heard. And Evan got so turned on by this permaculture class, he went home and quit high school and never went back.”

Sofro went to South America for three months and came back fluent in Spanish, McDorman says. “He’s just one of those gifted humans.”
 

When he got to the farm, he expected to find a dedicated crew of like-minded young people working in the fields with their hands. Instead, he found Benito Gutierrez, a man in his 60s, working alone on a tractor.

“I said, ‘Benito, where is everyone?’ Benito just kind of looked back and said, ‘You’re here.’ ”

Sofro waited for the person who ran the farm to arrive. After two weeks, it was clear no one else was coming, so he decided to stay through the harvest.

“Benito did everything involving tractor work, and I did everything that needed to be done by hand,” he says.

It was an unlikely partnership. Gutierrez has done small-scale conventional farming for most of his life.

“He’d love to put as much water out here as possible and just spray the heck out of everything,” Sofro says.

But the two found common ground.

“One day I was out there digging these beds, trying to set up an acre for vegetable production,” Sofro recalls. “Benito came out, looked at what I was doing, walked back to his tractor, flipped around a few blades and built exactly what I was building. Only he was able to lay it out, hundreds of feet, in the course of a minute and a half.”

And so began their relationship.

“He balances out my idealism and brings the reality,” Sofro says. “What it’s actually going to take. Together we’ve been able find that synthesis between healthy and efficient.”

Gutierrez agrees, even if he doesn’t always get the point.

“Still I don’t understand what they do,” he says with a laugh. “Evan, I told him, ‘You better stay here. We could do something.’ I tell people we’re in heaven with Evan.”

With Gutierrez on board, Sofro won over board members who were skeptical of his age and lack of formal education.

“Within a year, it became unanimous among my staff and the board to have him become farm manager,” McDorman says.
 

These days, the farm buzzes with the kind of youthful energy Sofro first envisioned, thanks to the creative use of funding and the donation of a few Airstream trailers. The organization took money for seasonal help to pollinate plants and created an internship program, now in its second season.

That took some experimentation, too, but it’s working. Under the program, five interns attend the organization’s six-day seed school at the Native Seeds/SEARCH offices in Tucson, then live and work at the farm from planting through harvest.

That extra help makes experimentation possible. And Sofro has seen some early successes. Last winter, he planted garbanzos and lentils using only rainfall for irrigation.

“Much to my surprise, we were able to pull yields,” he says.

As the monsoon clouds darken and humidity builds up in the afternoon, two interns, both tanned and shirtless, race against the rain to prepare a mixture of sesbania, millet, cowpeas, sesame and chia with the idea of tilling the seed into the fields to take advantage of the rain.

The experiment involves growing cover crops using monsoon rains and planting into the cover-cropped field the following summer. The idea is that the cover crops will lie down in winter, covering the ground to retain moisture. Vegetable seeds can sprout through the cover, but weeds can’t.

Gutierrez has nearly finished distributing the seeds as the first raindrops fall. As they give way to a drenching rain, the farmers head for shelter, leaving the rest to Mother Nature.